Free Audio Book Download: Joni Eareckson Tada "A Place of Healing"

As a teenager, Joni loved life. She enjoyed riding horses, hiking, tennis and loved to swim. One fateful hot summer day in July 1967 (Sunday July 30th), however, that all changed. While on a beach with some friends, Joni dove into Chesapeake Bay not knowing how shallow it really was. She had broken her neck - a fracture between the fourth and fifth cervical levels. She was now a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the shoulders down. While her friends were busy preparing to go to college in the fall, Joni was fighting for her very life and having to accept the fact that she would have to live out the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Joni’s rehabilitation was not easy. For the next two years during her rehabilitation Joni struggled. She was angry, struggled with depression and had frequent thoughts of suicide. She could not understand how God could let this happen to her. She participated in various rehabilitation programs that taught her how to live with her disabilities and she immersed herself in God’s Word to become spiritually strong. Since then, Joni’s life has been a full one. Joni has written fourteen books, has recorded several musical albums, starred in a major autobiographical movie of her life and she’s actively involved as an advocate for disabled people. During her two years of rehabilitation, Tada learned how to paint with a brush between her teeth, and later began selling her artwork.

Tada wrote of her experiences in her 1976 international best-selling autobiography, Joni, The unforgettable story of a young woman's struggle against quadriplegia & depression, which has been distributed in many languages, and which was made into a 1979 feature film of the same name, starring herself, which told of her accident, struggles and subsequent life. Her second book, A Step Further, was released in 1978.